© 2017 Suraj Lakshminarasimhan All
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
© 2017 SURAJ LAKSHMINARASIMHAN ALL RIGHTS RESERVED COOKING “INDIA”: IDENTITIES AND IDEOLOGIES IN INDIAN COOKBOOKS FROM THE NINETEENTH CENTURY TO THE PRESENT DAY A Thesis Presented to The Graduate Faculty of The University of Akron In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in History Suraj Lakshminarasimhan August 2017 COOKING “INDIA”: IDENTITIES AND IDEOLOGIES IN INDIAN COOKBOOKS FROM THE NINETEENTH CENTURY TO THE PRESENT DAY Suraj Lakshminarasimhan Thesis Approved: Accepted: _______________________________ _______________________________ Dr. Martin Wainwright Dr. Chand Miha Faculty Advisor Dean of the College _______________________________ _______________________________ Dr. Stephen Harp Dr. Chand Midha Faculty Reader Interim Dean of the Graduate School _______________________________ _______________________________ Dr. Martin Wainwright Date Department Chair ii ABSTRACT This paper traces the history of Indian cookbooks from the nineteenth century to the present, explaining how food texts and food culture act as a method of identification. This paper attempts to illustrate how cookbooks demonstrate discourses of colonialism and nationalism as well as postcolonial identity construction, revealing how cookbooks both codify and contradict tradition and modernity. This study begins by analyzing cookbooks produced by British writers in India and at home, showing how cookbook authors represented Indian cuisine as both an antithesis to European fare, yet also as an aspect of British identity. British cookbook authors in the subcontinent sought to organize, simplify, or “improve” Indian cuisine, while cookbooks produced in Great Britain understood the cuisine of the empire as the cuisine of the nation. From there, this paper examines cookbooks and food discourse by Indian nationalists, noting how they called for a return to traditional Indian food as well as adapting “modern cooking” to suit norms of domesticity. The analysis moves to Indian cookbooks produced after independence explaining how they continued to define identity through food. Rather than a singular Indian identity produced as a result of Indian independence, cookbooks produced after 1947 demonstrate various interpretations of Indian identity by Indian authors, all seeking to define India and its food based on their preconceptions and interpretations. This study concludes with the abundance of cookbooks since economic liberalization focusing on the tension between tradition and modernity as a parallel to India’s identity contest in present politics. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION……………………………………………….……………………1 II. CODIFYING IMPERIALISM: COOKBOOKS AND REPRESENTATIONS OF BRITISH IDENTITY..........................................................……………………...7 III. NATIONS, INCORPORATION, AND REDEFINITION: COOKBOOKS BY VICTORIAN WOMEN AND INDIAN NATIONALISTS…………………….21 IV. IDEOLOGIES AFTER “THE END OF INDIAN HISTORY”: INDIAN COOKBOOKS AFTER INDEPENDENCE 1947-1990………………………...36 V. LIBERALIZATION, GLOBALIZATION, AND THE TENSION OF TRADITION AND MODERNITY: COOKBOOKS FROM 1990 TO THE PRESENT……...66 VI. CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………….…89 END NOTES……………………………………………………………………………91 BIBLIOGRAPHY ……………………………………………………………………105 iv CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION The history of India from the nineteenth century to the present day offers historians many different eras of study. While many scholars focus on colonial India, noting the impact of European presence, others highlight Indian nationalism as a refutation of the West. Along with studies in postcolonialism, comparative history, and subaltern studies, scholars have done their best to determine the identities and ideologies of Indian people. But how did contemporary people articulate their own identity in relation to the Indian subcontinent? How did Anglo-Indians (British officers and administrators living in India), Victorian women, Indian nationalists, and voices after Indian independence interpret “India”? To comprehend the multitude of voices involved in self-identification and defining “otherness,” cookbooks and food serve as effective lenses for understanding culture and society. Although developing out of social history, food history largely owes its origin to the cultural turn, its multidisciplinary nature indebted to anthropology and cultural studies as well as history. Cookbooks reflect how their authors understood society and culture as well as individual identity; their works expose the formation of self in the context of cultural interchange.1 Thus, this paper traces the history of Indian cookbooks by Anglo-Indian, Western, and Indian writers from the mid nineteenth century to the present, explaining how food texts and food culture act as a method of defining the Indian nation. Cookbooks are more 1 than a combination of recipes; they are cultural documents in which authors imprint their identity and ideology. British and Anglo-Indian authors used their cookbooks to depict India in a way they might understand it, often encoding an imperial agenda in the process. To counter Western assumptions, Indian cookbook writers used cookbooks to articulate “the real India,” an identity based on their terms. While Britons and Indians offered cookbooks as their interpretation of the subcontinent, often reaching vastly different interpretations, it would be false to say there was no exchange or cultural borrowing between European and Indian cuisine. The fact that in 2001, foreign secretary Robin Cook declared chicken tikka masala (an English dish modeled after Indian cuisine) a “British national dish”2 and that Indians frequently drink tea3 and serve various egg dishes attests to two-way acculturation flowering from by imperial contact.4 Nevertheless, cookbooks represent methods of self-identification for the author as well as their specific interpretation of India based on ideology. Additionally, this paper examines how cookbooks both codify and contradict tradition and modernity. Cookbooks often claim to possess knowledge of traditional cooking, yet the decision to both publish and purchase a cookbook is an inherently modern enterprise, breaking away from oral tradition and culinary education from family members. Caste, class, and gender receive special attention when applicable, as the publication of cookbooks is inherently a process of inclusion and exclusion; while the pages of cookbooks celebrate some facets of Indian society, others fade over time. Cookbook authors often come from the middle or upper class and in turn write for a middle to upper class audience, demonstrating certain political agendas while ignoring or overlooking the food cultures of the impoverished or minority groups. Cookbook authors 2 tried to understand India and its cuisine through the books they wrote, resulting in vastly different explanations and interpretations of food, people, and nation from the nineteenth century to the present day. While the production of cookbooks has increased exponentially throughout the late twentieth century, the study of Indian cookbooks, especially those produced after Indian independence, remains overlooked except for Arjun Appadurai’s “How to Make a National Cuisine: Cookbooks in Contemporary India,” written in 1988. He argues that India lacks a national cuisine due to the prominence of regional cuisines and Hindu doctrine regarding the production and consumption of food. Food served as a communication of hierarchy between castes and a basis for Ayurvedic moral axioms, but these gastronomic issues did not affect culinary issues; the person that prepared permitted foods mattered more than how it was prepared.5 Appadurai views cookbooks produced by the Indian middle class as the method of determining a national cuisine. Uma Narayan’s “Eating Cultures: Incorporation, Identity, and Indian Food” in Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and Third-World Feminism (1997) discusses the role of food in identity formation, focusing on this process in both colonial and postcolonial India. However, she does not cite or reference any cookbooks, integral not only for understanding the food people ate in the nineteenth and twentieth, but for understanding the relationship between food, identity, and interpretation of India. This paper attempts to explain this process, how cookbook authors from the Indian subcontinent and elsewhere understood and presented Indian cuisine, simultaneously articulating their own identities and ideologies through the pages of cookbooks. 3 The historiography of Indian food and cuisine includes broad overviews of the subcontinent, most notably Indira Chakravarty’s Saga of Indian Food: A Historical and Cultural Survey (1972), R.S. Khare’s Hindu Hearth and Home (1976) and K.T. Achaya’s Indian Food: A Historical Companion (1994) and A Historical Dictionary of Indian Food (1998). Chakravarty’s work traces the development of Indian cuisine throughout the history of the Indian subcontinent, but like many works of Indian history, it follows an Indian nationalist interpretation of history and presents India’s culinary development as “ending” with independence in 1947. Khare’s examines India’s food ways through anthropology, while Achaya’s meticulous survey adds a historical dimension to all facets of Indian gastronomy. These works discuss the history of food in the Indian subcontinent, explaining what was eaten and how cuisine changed over time, but do not reference the importance of cookbooks for defining culinary norms for Anglo-Indian colonialists or Indian nationalists.